#craig barnes

[fancypantsrecords]

Craig Barnes - Streets Of Rogue | Ship To Shore PhonoCo. | 2022 | Black

[gaydelgard]

[gordoncstewart]

Telling the Truth -- the Journey of Repair

Telling the Truth — the Journey of Repair

An earlier Views from from the Edge post featured a brief summary of an unusual step: a Board of Trustees’ $27.6M action plan to redress institutional entanglement in institutional slavery and ongoing institutional racism. Here’s the full press release from Princeton, New Jersey (founded in 1819).

Princeton Theological Seminary in 1879 PRESS RELEASE, Princeton, NJ, October 18, 2019

PRINC…

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[gordoncstewart]

An honest to God real time act of reparation

An honest to God real time act of reparation

IT HAPPENED IN NEW JERSEY

New Jersey is not the first place one expects to hear a public confession of slavery with an action plan to make reparations for institutional racism. It may, therefore, come as a surprise that Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the nation’s oldest educational institutions, has put New Jersey on the map of the national debate about reparations.

REPENTANCE FOR…

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[dk-thrive]

There is a hole inside of you (Part III)

And over against that temptation, stand pastors in churches all around the world, right in front of the altar, holding up the sacrament.  And one after another, their parishioners come forward to them with lives that are far from whole and complete.  And there is an extraordinary moment when a pastor and a parishioner meet at the altar. The pastor is holding the broken body of Christ, the parishioners come up one after another, and then there is this moment of spiritual intimacy when the Pastor looks the parishioner in the eye.  We remember the job that was lost.  Or the diagnosis of cancer. Or the prodigal son. Or the dream that is never going to come true. Or the cherished old lover who was left behind in the grave. […]

A Savior who commissions us…who gives us not what we were itching for, something far better.  A glorious mission and purpose to lives, lives that can make a world of difference. There is a glorious mission for your life. You weren’t brought here by accident…Don’t try to get your life just right before taking up that mission.

In the words of John Calvin, All Rise.

Leave the garden better than you found it.

That’s your mission. To leave our society better than you found it.

But you’re not going to be able to do that unless you know how to steward that thing that is missing. This is what gives you freedom actually that thing that’s missing. You’ve got choices as to how you respond to it.

One of the beloved members of my family is a hairy sheep dog. His name is Esau. Religion majors will get that. Esau is not just beloved, he is a good dog. He is obedient.  He is well trained. But if you were to show up on our front porch with a hot dog, he will follow you anywhere.  The beast that he is, he is driven by his appetites. Part of what it means to be made in the image in God, is to have the capacity to rise above your appetite, to make choices that are worthy of you. To use your life to for something that will make a difference even if doesn’t feel good along the way. […]

It was as if Mrs. Williams was proclaiming a holy mystery to us in the third grade.  And here it is:

God is not easy on the people God uses.

If you look at the people who got caught in the biblical drama, by the end of their lives, all of them were discolored and pretty much taped together. The Apostle Paul ends his life after being kicked out of most of the towns in the Roman Empire, usually with a shower of rocks behind him, he’s in jail, and what is it though that he writes about?  His prison epistles are all about the surpassing joy he has in how his life was used.  Why? Because he got caught up in the drama.  Because he was used. He had so many holes in his life, he had a thorn even that he prayed for God to remove, and God would not, saying my grace is sufficient for you, don’t get distracted by this thorn in the flesh, get back to your mission. That’s all that he wanted. So, he ends his life so joyfully because his life was used.  So can yours be. It can be caught up in a great holy drama.  God’s drama with the world around us. You can play a role in that.

But you have to have an altar.

A place where you bring your yearning in exchange it for a holy mission. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

~ The Reverend Dr. M. Craig Barnes, President and Professor of pastoral ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. An excerpt from his sermon on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at the Baccalaureate at Wake Forest University

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[dk-thrive]

There is a hole inside of you (Part II)

When my daughter graduated from college, I was amazed to hear the commencement speaker peddle the exact same drivel when I graduated from college. He looked out over 5,000 graduates and said to them: you are among the brightest and best we have ever seen. Set your goals high, dream your own dreams, chase your own star, and you can be anything that you want to be.

Really?

He might of well have said: I’m sorry we have nothing for you. It’s all out there, go put it together the best you can. 

And that’s really the assumption that we have that life is something we self-construct, not something we inherit. Not something that comes upon us with glorious mission, but self-construct. And the way we think we self-construct our own life is through our choices.

Anyone who has done parenting in the last generation knows that all good parenting advice has been about helping Johnny make good choices. So when Johnny throws a rock through the window, you’re not supposed to go out and spank him.  You bring Johnny in, you show him the glass on the floor and the rock and ask Johnny: was this a good choice? Johnny’s who a smart young man says: I’m thinking no. Right. Good choice. Good choice.

Then as Johnny gets older then, then you know, the choices become more important, there’s more at stake, the anxiety level goes up, but its still about making good choices. Right up until Johnny applies to go to college. Then the stakes get really high. I’ll never forget the anxiety that my daughter went through. The reach schools. The safety schools. God help you if find out that your reach school is someone else’s safety school.  You hope that the school that you are choosing you, chooses you.  

And finally when you get through that, you get to school, the first thing that they tell you to do, is what, choose a major.   Only you don’t think you are choosing a major, you think you are choosing your life. And you are 18. There’s a lot at stake. So you don’t really know what to choose. Then there’s Grey’s Anatomy.  That’s a good show. Doctor! I’ll be a doctor. It’s real easy, you just choose it.  You get on the Registrar’s web site and you type in pre-med. You’re going to be a Doctor. Then you take Biology 101 and you realize you’re not going to be a Doctor.  It’s not a problem. You just go back to the Registrar’s website because you can just choose again. Pre-Med. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Let’s see – – there’s a lot of good lawyer shows.  Pre-Law. Submit. And in 15 minutes you think you’ve changed the trajectory of your life, it was so easy, it was just a choice. As I watched my daughter, I discovered you can do this three or four times, actually.  And then as soon as you graduate, what you’re going to hear people say to you is, pick a job.  I remember saying this myself, sweetheart, just pick a job.  Any job would be good.  Just choose.

And here’s where it gets interesting, after you pick your job, if you decide that you don’t like it, the old mentality of getting on the Registrar’s website perseveres. And you think you should be able to pick again. If you don’t like that job, just choose again.  This is way people relate to the rest of their lives. If you don’t like your church, you just choose again. If you don’t like the town you are living in, if you don’t like your friends, or for that matter, you don’t like your family, you just keep choosing.  And as a pastor I watched my parishioners eat up their precious, fleeting years, constantly choosing, thinking if they just made the right choice, they can fill up that hole inside of them.

~ The Reverend Dr. M. Craig Barnes, President and Professor of pastoral ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. An excerpt from his sermon on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at the Baccalaureate at Wake Forest University

Reference: There’s a hole inside of you (Part I)

[dk-thrive]

There is a hole inside of you

There is a hole inside of you.

It has been there for a long time, but by the time you graduate from college, you are acutely aware of this thing in your life that is missing. I don't know what that is.  It may involve a relationship, it may involve something regarding your health, or something troubling in your past. Trust me it does not matter how many degrees you get, you are never going to have a better past.

Or, maybe the hole in your life is a dream that just seems to keep alluding you. It's not the same thing for all of us. The only thing that's the same is that we are all missing something.  Trust me on this, your future success depends completely on how you handle this hole in your life.

If you are a person of prayer, you've been drawn to passages in the bible that say things like ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.  And over the years there has been a lot of asking and seeking and knocking on the door, but still the hole in you perseveres.  At times the yearning is intense if you allow it, it will take over your life with insatiable appetite.

Those of us who hang around churches, pretended to think that such persistent yearning is the result of living in a world that long ago fell from paradise. But I'm not so sure.  We have only a very few pages of the bible that describe what God had in mind from the beginning.  And then we messed that up. And the entire rest of the book is about the Recovery Plan, actually.

So these opening pages from Genesis are extremely important to us describing what the Creator had in mind. And isn't it fascinating that we were placed in this garden, we were told that we can freely eat of almost all of the fruit of it, all this fruit around us, which was given by God, and to take of the fruit of the garden was an act of doxology giving praise to God, from whom all of these blessings that have come to us.

Except for one fruit, that was not given, not blessed for us.  Which means that by God's created design, something is supposed to be missing from your garden. And do you remember where God placed this forbidden fruit? In the middle of the garden! Right here! Not off in some corner where it can be easily ignored.  This had to have driven Adam and Eve nuts.  Every day they walked by this thing and were reminded that they were never supposed to have the whole garden.

You cannot have it all. And now again, this is not punishment. This is before the fall. This is God's idea of paradise. A good creation. Where you are not completely whole.  Only Gods are whole, lacking in nothing.

This drives us nuts.  There can be 999 good trees in your garden that you can freely go to and receive God's blessings for your life but where do we always pitch our tent? Underneath this one thing we don't have.  We think about it all the time.  We obsess over it and let the rest of the garden go to weed.  What am I going to do about this thing that I don't have?  And so we are tempted to reach for more than we were created to have.

As the story goes, when we reach beyond our limits, that's when we lose paradise. And on the way out, we start to think, you know, it was a pretty good garden after all.  

Only now it is paradise lost.

~ The Reverend Dr. M. Craig Barnes, President and Professor of pastoral ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. An excerpt from his sermon on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at the Baccalaureate at Wake Forest University

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[mandu-blog]

“Saul was converted from being a persecutor to an apostle of the church. Ananias was converted from fear to hospitality. In one of the finest moments of the Early Church, Ananias goes to his persecutor Saul. He places his hands on Saul, and the first words he says, the first words Saul heard from the church he tried to destroy were, ‘Brother Saul.’ He made his tormentor his brother. The way the church has always, always, always overcome persecution is by reaching out to the tormentor, saying ‘Brother Saul.’ That is what Christ asks of you in responding to your tormentor as well. Can you say it to the ex? To the person who is trying to get your job? To the person who has dragged you into court? Or who hurt you so deeply? It is the only way to transform evil with love.”